xenia > Recent Status Updates

This is cool. It's connecting dysregulation (affect) to disintegration (self) as integral to experiences of shame. It's not simply that one is dysregulated, it's that such dysregulation annihilates the self. Bpd spiral, narcissistic rage, depressive withdrawal, a relationship has collapsed, or perhaps been foisted on you so strongly, you're eclipsed by the violence of the other, perceived or real. Humiliation. Loss.

"almost all of what we think of as narcissistic pathology is not an expression of self, but rather, an escape from self"

mf shooting so many bullets at me rn 🫣

—

though, there is a point where the narcissistic performance, replaced with vulnerability rather than perfectionism, transforms from dissociative objectification to embodied freedom

i.e. a role becomes a calling

a whimsical reprieve after reading about fascist women for a month 😪

can't wait to read about monkeys passing psychoactive millipedes around like a joint again

This is cool. It's essentially a genealogy of intersectional feminism that delves a hundred years back before its coining by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Scholars already noted that the Combahee River Collective saw oppression intersectionally, but intersectionality goes so much further back. Against all this, the white supremacist feminist, desiring the colonialist's hat and whip and enforced hysterectomies for black women.

turns out i find biblical exegeses exceeding boring, so ima return to the history of religious revolts ✌️

feminist benevolence as colonial subjugation, the reduction of indigenous folk to children, nourished by the bosom of white empire. the civilising mission as cultural genocide, yet, paradoxically, a means towards self-determination through education, letters, books, lectures, creating pan-african and pan-indian circles composed of displaced kin. the master's tools are multiple in their possibilities.

a trans science mommy talking about sex, gender, sexuality variations from genes and hormones to lizards and birbs to hijra and tombois im gonna faint 🥵

moving to london in the fall to trans the fuck out of religious studies and unearth thousands of years of buried queer tales in buddhism, daoism, and shintoism. reading as much about fascism and transphobia as i can before i land. if everything goes well, my wife and i will explore ancient towns and forests where peasant revolts and pagan rites took place. if things turn south, we lived as we loved—in freedom.

Episodic memory captures harm, semantic memory the response to harm. Therapy traces present behaviours, thoughts, and feelings to intense, evocative episodic memories, so that the semantic schema can come into conscious knowledge. "If I act this way, I'll be abandoned, therefore I must act this other way". There is a problem, there is a solution. Intervention only comes after such knowledge is fully integrated.

white feminist gynoneurologists argued that the vagina interfaced with the brain, moral sentiment emerging through sexual pleasure, but one regulated through self-control, else the white race descend into workingclass degeneration or black primitivity. chaste heterosexual coupling led to civilisation—all else were threats eliminated through exclusion, eugenics, and euthanisation. the promiscuous were race traitors.

sentimental as the capacity to reflect on impressions and develop moral feelings, empirically measured through physiological traits tied to higher consciousness, stabilised in the european male-female dyad whose entwined effects of rationality and sentimentality found civilisation, against the unfeeling undifferentiated reflex-driven savages—white supremacist heteropatriarchal genocide as benevolence. superb research

Am struck by how much this mirrors Elizabeth Howell's dissociation-based phrase treatment. Counteractive methods (emotional/attentional regulation) diminish symptoms, but don't erase them. Trauma work involves reactivating emotional schemas (parts, maladaptions) and introducing contradictions to cause a mismatch between frame and reality. This must be repeated until the schema is rewritten completely.

ohh man, apparently the slapstick violence of koan exchanges was a form of resistance to the strict hierarchies of confucianism that ruled the tang dynasty. students and masters constantly switched roles breaking from rigidified social norms to reveal the emptiness of all form. authority is as transient as we make it.

holy fucking shit, gang. there was a commie in poland who became a nazi member to survive, and he ended up stamping a bunch of border passes to other commies and jews so they could gtfo and survive. history is fucking insane.

okay gang, this book is 600 pages, not because it's packed with information, but because the author keeps repeating himself. im losing my mind

Hmm, the author kinda pisses me off. They'll get all up in arms about prejudice against queer folk, then just mention the theft and rape of women as lawful forms of marriage for ksatriya in the Manusmriti without any comment. Fuck sake, man.

There's a lot of cool info about vedic society and how third genders (gay, trans, and intersex) were treated with respect and even religious awe, but it's all framed by a very inconsistent progressive stance that plays into biological determinism (we're born this way!) yet also posits environmental/cultural determinants (birds become gay due to overcrowding!). Like, come on babe, stick to one argument x.x

Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.

A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.

Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Your loving doesn't know its majesty,
until it knows its helplessness.

All this fantasy
and grief.

Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night out of the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.

did not expect every writer in this to be a queer punk dharma anarchist, but i should have lol

just learnt that the story of dinah in the torah is about a daughter who goes to "visit the women of the land" then is raped, starting a war between the israelites and hivites. by the medieval period, dinah had become a symbol of the woman who deserved her punishment due to her curiosity and idleness.

now i gotta replay last of us part ii and analyse why the FUCK one of the characters is called dinah 🤷‍♀️

this is not just a fantastic analysis of class, but of patriarchy and heteronormativity in antiquity. im kinda blown away. over and again, chris shows how integral patriarchal control of women's bodies was to the aristocracy, whether of the greek pater or arabic harem. marriage consolidated class through the mechanism of inheritance. over and again, peasant revolted through collective property and care. its profound.

heh, so on the other pole from celibacy was cynicism, another refusal of patriarchy and marriage, but this time through sexual promiscuity, nonmonogamy, and gender noncomformity. no slavish fixation to the social ladder, to chauvinist norms of honour and propriety, just fucking public in a park cuz it makes you happy and embracing your son's loving marriage to a sex worker 💖

sooo, from antiquity to the medieval period (hell, even to now), celibacy was used to refuse patriarchal injunctions, because marriage centralised power into the patriarch. celibacy was an escape from gendered violence and institutionalised misogyny.

losing my mind realising the conservative trope of the good hardworking rural folk vs the corrupt decadent urbanites came from ancient jewish peasants being taxed to fuck by hellenistic forces funding gentrification projects, like gymnasiums where naked men grappled with each other. in this case, the decadent urbanites were imperialist aristocrats leeching off the labour of poor colonised jews.

im such a dumb dumb. gentrification comes from gentry, the landed aristocrats who move into conquered land and, through tithes and taxes, accumulate wealth into cities modeled after the imperial centre. in this case, hellenised roman gentry and jewish high priests extracted resources and stole land from the jewish peasantry. they responded with social banditry. robin hood shit. then anti-imperialist war.

one of the most boomer ass screeds ive ever read. this man is so cucked by his war trauma that any emancipatory movement is read as the advent to stalinist purges and nazi genocide. he spends pages detailing the atrocities of poor movements, then describes their punishments by the church and the state in single lines. even when innocents are burned alive, atrocity is singularly fixed on 'anarchists'. jesus wept.

mf keeps calling hierarchically-organised xenophobic populist fanatics 'anarchists' rather than fascists. i just dont get liberals at all. they just collapse every stance that isn't theirs into the camp of extremist. they're so dishonest.

i am still learning a lot about hierarchically-organised xenophobic populist christian fanatics though, lol.